POPULAR FALLACIES : XV.—THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB
We could never quite understand the
philosophy of this arrangement, or the wisdom of our
ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly
bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing
to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he
can. Man found out long sixes. Hail
candle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon,
the kindliest luminary of the three if
we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy,
mild viceroy of the moon! We love to read,
talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle-light.
They are every body’s sun and moon. This
is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting
it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors
have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses!
They must have lain about and grumbled at one another
in the dark. What repartees could have passed,
when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled
a neighbour’s cheek to be sure that he understood
it? This accounts for the seriousness of the
elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod
or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlantern’d
nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder
how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any.
How did they sup? what a melange of chance carving
they must have made of it! here one had
got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse’s
shoulder there another had dipt his scooped
palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated
right mare’s milk. There is neither good
eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these
civilised times, has never experienced this, when at
some economic table he has commenced dining after
dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came?
The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally.
Can you tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish
Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the candle
from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left
ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, but he knows
it only by an inference; till the restored light,
coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses
the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs!
how he burnishes! There is absolutely no
such thing as reading, but by a candle. We have
tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens,
and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away.
Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering
and teazing, like so many coquets, that will have
you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions.
By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations.
By the same light, we must approach to their perusal,
if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is
a mockery, all that is reported of the influential
Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the
sun’s light. They are abstracted works
“Things that were born, when none
but the still night,
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching
throes.”
Marry, daylight daylight
might furnish the images, the crude material; but
for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing
(as mine author hath it), they must be content to
hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild
internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the
domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night
and silence call out the starry fancies, Milton’s
Morning Hymn on Paradise, we would hold a good wager,
was penned at midnight; and Taylor’s richer
description of a sun-rise smells decidedly of the taper.
Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune
our best measured cadences (Prose has her cadences)
not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman,
“blessing the doors;” or the wild sweep
of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation
than we have yet attempted, courts our endeavours.
We would indite something about the Solar System. Betty,
bring the candles.